News

GigaSpaces announced the launch of its Cloud-enabled Application Platform for Enterprise PaaS & ISV SaaS Enablement at CloudConnect on Monday, March 7. InfoQ caught up with the GigaSpaces team to take a closer look.

Oracle's Mark Reinhold has announced that the JDK 7 Developer Preview build (milestone 12) is now available and the firm is keen to hear developer feedback. The majority of Java IDEs are also moving rapidly to support the new features of Java 7. However concern has been expressed in some quarters over the pre-release software evaluation license terms.

This week, Red Hat announced it acquired Makara, a cloud based platform as a service company. Makara is unusual among PaaS providers in that it doesn't have any infrastructure of its own. InfoQ examines some of the details about where Makara differs from other providers.

Stefan Richter, CTO of Freiheit.com, explained this week at the Google Developer Day in Munich, his vision for writing rich internet applications using HTML5 and Google App Engine and why he thinks that it will be more difficult to build a client-side component based HTML5 when compared to Server-based page rendering.

Rod Johnson details VMWare's new Cloud Application Platform Vision, vFabric. It is based on all SpringSource assets and VMware's virtualization technology. Now that nearly all major actors of the Cloud are aiming at PaaS, it may be time to ask whether IaaS is "dead"? and whether PaaS will be able get mindshare of most IT organizations?

The Eclipse Virgo project has been approved at Eclipse, and provisioning and initial code import will be happening in the next week or two. Eclipse Virgo is the new name for SpringSource dm Server, which is also undergoing a license change from GPL to EPL to make it more acceptable for others to build and redistribute. Modular applications are the way of the future, and Eclipse Virgo will be key.

PhoneGap allows to build cross platform mobile apps with HTML5 and Javascript; it has APIs for accessing camera, accelerometer, GPS, etc. The code is packaged into native apps which can be deployed via app stores. PhoneGap support includes iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Palm. InfoQ talked to one of the creators of PhoneGap, Brian LeRoux of Nitobi, about the current state of PhoneGap.

The Adobe Flex ecosystem has experienced significant growth in the last years, with a plethora of community driven projects and deployments. Never the less, in the last few months there have been several developments like its exclusion from the iPad platform, community reactions about long lasting bugs and more, that have led to questions about its future viability.

Caucho has announced that it will support the Java EE6 Web Profile in the next iteration of their lightweight application server, Resin 4.0. The Java EE6 Web Profile specifies a lighter, modern subset of the full Java EE6 specification, which must contend with backwards compatability.

The Symbian Foundation announced their intention to open source the Symbian platform almost 20 months ago. While some consider this as an important move for the most deployed platform in mobile devices, others think that it is too late.

The Unladen Swallow project that aims to speed up Python has proposed to be merged into mainstream Python. One of Unladen Swallow's goals was to remove the GIL; a new implementation of Python's GIL by Antoine Pitrou will be fairer and less intrusive on multicore CPUs. Also: Squeak Smalltalk has been ported to Android.

ThoughtWorks has released the Technology Radar 2010 this month, a white paper containing ThoughtWorks' technology strategy and trends in four major domains: Techniques, Tools, Languages, and Platforms. InfoQ looked at this whitepaper in depth to better understand the ideas and suggestions being offered by ThoughtWorks.